The Modern Victory Garden

Garden chores this week were confined to two primary tasks – finishing the landscaping clean up I started last weekend, and the next big round of seed starting.     Saturday was largely taken up with errands and various household projects but I did manage to finish weeding and cultivating the terraced perennial plants bed in the front of the house while I supervised the hen’s free range time.   With that task completed I am done with the landscape maintenance for a while, at least until it is time to plant up the front entry area planters with annuals.   This means I can turn my attention back to getting the vegetable garden tidied up for the early spring planting process.    I had hoped to do a little more in that regards this weekend, but ran out of time with other commitments I had to keep.   On Sunday though, I did get the next big round of seed starting done.   I planted 18 each of the following items:

• Peppers – Lady Bell
• Peppers – Early Jalapeno
• Tomatoes – Siletz
• Tomatoes – Legend
• Tomatoes – Paisano (sauce)
• Tomatoes – Amish Paste (sauce)
• Tomatoes – Cherokee Purple
• Tomatoes – Stupice

Of course I only need a few plants of each for my own garden, but I plant way more than that as it covers losses that occur from seed to transplant, and then all the extras are donated to the Giving Garden and are shared with my employees and co-workers.

Previously I started onions, leeks, celery, broccoli, lettuces, Napa cabbage, and basil (to be grown indoors as a houseplant).   Those earlier started plants are growing and thriving.   In fact, I need to take some time in the coming week and do a thinning out of the extra starts.

With the seeds I started on Sunday, the grow light shelves are currently now all full.

HARVEST MONDAY

Each Monday Daphne’s Dandelions hosts the “Harvest Monday” blog hop.   Everyone participating submits links to their posts summarizing the week’s harvests.   It’s always very interesting and inspiring to see what other gardeners are producing from so many different growing regions.    Here’s my contribution to the weekly harvest recaps for the week of February 11th through 17th, 2013.

The fresh harvests are rather minimal right now as we are busy using up our storage and frozen items from the prior year’s garden.    I had to toss several winter squash into the compost pile this week as they were suddenly developing bad spots.   They actually held up in storage for a long time this year.   We have been eating quite a lot from them up until just recently when they suddenly started going soft on us.   So far the potatoes are still holding up quite nicely but there will come a point in the not too distant future where they too will get soft and start sprouting.   On Sunday, I harvested all of the remaining over wintered beets from the garden.

These were roasted until tender, allowed to cool sufficiently so that the skins could be slipped off easily, then cut into large dices and tossed with a little melted butter and a sprinkle of salt and served as a side dish to baked pork chops stuffed with a craisan and bread stuffing.

Big work day planned for the Giving Garden next weekend.   Barring foul weather we have a large team of volunteers scheduled to arrive for a long day of putting up rabbit fencing, debris pick up, weeding, general garden tidy up (left over from last fall), moving trellis supports, building compost bins, and moving large quantities of compost.    Keep your fingers crossed for us that the weather will cooperate.

Laura

kitsapFG